I’m always switching back-and-forth between the 2 different InnoDB flavors in MariaDB – XtraDB+ and the standard InnoDB plugin, so I thought I’d simply post all of the various combinations in a single place. (And then I cover enabling the InnoDB Plugin in MySQL, since it’s an option in 5.1.) [Addition: Thanks to Andrew and Sergei for the tips on shortening plugin-load=. The changes are reflected below.]

Note: Below is for Windows. For Linux, simply change “.dll” to “.so” where appropriate.

MariaDB 10.0:

Do not add anything, as the standard InnoDB plugin is the current default (as of 10.0.3, although I do anticipate this changing in the near future, and I’ll update the post accordingly when that happens).

MariaDB 5.5:

# Enable the 2 below to disable XtraDB+ and enable the standard InnoDB Plugin
ignore_builtin_innodb
plugin-load=ha_innodb.dll

…

As some of you may or may not know, I’ve maintained a list of all InnoDB Plugin versions as they’ve historically contained a different version (entirely different numbering scheme) than the MySQL distribution they were included with.

This list was most helpful for troubleshooting various InnoDB issues when the plugin may (or may not) have been involved, and/or for benchmarking, etc. And it’s fair to say it was more useful when the InnoDB plugin was not the mainstream, which it is now.

However, with the latest releases, in MySQL and MariaDB, the “InnoDB Version” simply matches the “MySQL Version”. These “latest releases” include: MySQL 5.6.10, MySQL 5.5.30, MySQL 5.1.68, and MariaDB 5.5.30

Of course this isn’t the most newsworthy story, but having maintained this “list” the past couple/few years, I was happy to see the change, …

I'm not sure I care what the version number is (5.3,5.4,5.4,6.0), and you can talk about milestone releases all you want. What really matters to me is when we'll have something beyond 5.1 marked as GA. Will it be 5.5? When should I expect that?

5.4 was announced last year at the conference with lots of performance fixes for the mysql server itself. Great. Until those changes percolate up into a stable release, they aren't worth too much to me. With all the hoopla about the release cycle, I haven't seen any results in the form of new features/fixes making it to stable any faster than 5.1 did.

What's the point of any release cycle beyond getting good solid code to stable in a timely (i.e., not 3 years) and safe (i.e., well tested) manner? Can't we have both timely and safe?